Landscape design

Margiela the innovator

Paris celebrates the Belgian designer with two events: a retrospective of 100 models at Palais Galliera and an exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs on his six years as art director of Hermès.

Two exhibitions in Paris present the daringly experimental work of Martin Margiela (b. 1957). The subversive Belgian designer, who graduated from the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Antwerp and worked as an assistant to Jean Paul Gaultier between 1984 and 1987, came up with some enigmatic creations that defy classification: sometimes minimalist, always deconstructed, often oversize and seemingly unfinished.

From the outset, his work called into question the traditional structure of clothes, and challenged the very nature of the fashion system. This retiring innovator who few can put a face to (he is rarely photographed and never gives interviews) attached to his garments mysterious, plain white fabric labels on which no more than a serial number identifying the range was printed. White in its various subtle shades is his favourite “non-colour”.

He also uses offbeat materials that are not at all what you expect to find in the world of fashion, for creations that seem to have more to do with contemporary art than clothing ranges. His shows were always set in rough-and-ready metropolitan locations, such as warehouses or even open fields. From 3 March to 15 July, the Paris Fashion Museum in Palais Galliera presents a retrospective with hundreds of models covering the twenty years from spring-summer 1989 to spring-summer 2009. Meanwhile, from 22 March to 2 September, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs offers insights into the collaboration between this master of minimalism and the Hermès fashion house, in the years between 1997 and 2003, when he was its art director.

In Paris the artist Tomás Saraceno conquers the 13,000 square metres of the Palais...

21 November 2018

Founded in 1961 by Piera Peroni Abitare magazine has crossed the history of costume, architecture and design, international, following in its pages the evolution of our ways of life and how we inhabit places